Tonight, Vanessa Fox posted a nice piece on Searchengineland: Caffeine: Google’s New Search Index. Obviously I rushed to the sandbox environment and tried out a bunch of queries that I always use and probably know the rankings of the top 10 better on those keywords than I know the way to work, I thought I would compare.

As Vanessa already writes:

Undoubtedly, Google Caffeine will cause quite a kerfluffle in the web developer and search engine optimization world and many will dive in to try and figure out the changes. We’ll likely see many a speculative blog post about how best to optimize for the new infrastructure, but my guess is that it likely does what Google search does, but better. And the foundational elements of having a crawlable infrastructure and compelling content remain.

She is right. Tomorrow, if the fires of the Facebook/Friendfeed marriage has calmed down, all SEO bloggers will put all their energy in the algorithmic changes this nice cup of caffeine will bring to the G index.

Let me spoil the fun, the main difference between the “old” index and the “new” index is revealed after the two screenshots below:

Right, the difference is:

Caffeine does not have any advertisements!

Yes, that’s right. No Paid Ads on the side of the search results. Highly likely this is not the way it’s going to roll out on the main site 🙂